A growing number of businesses and other entities are using social media platforms to engage with customers and other consumers of goods and services. Social customer service (SCS) personnel may be responsible for creating, promoting, developing, or encouraging positive experiences, which involve leveraging social media platforms to proactively enhance the consumer experience, and/or addressing, resolving, and controlling the exposure of negative experiences, such as resolving consumer problems. Effective SCS interactions with consumers may help improve an organization's brand and image, while ineffective interactions may have little effect or even be damaging. Even outside the context of business, individuals may find themselves encouraging positive social experiences and discouraging negative social experiences in order to enhance their social environments and improve their social images.
Social relationship management (SRM) systems are applications through which organizations may manage SCS interactions with former, current, and future customers. SRM systems typically integrate a variety of components into a unified service to facilitate engagement and management of relationships with consumers over social media channels. Example SRM components may include, without limitation, a social listening component that monitors posts on social media channels (such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat, Periscope, Google Plus, Yelp, WeChat, FourSquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and/or WordPress, etc.) for relevant content, a social analytic component that analyzes relevant posts detected on social media channels, and a publishing component that allows SRM users (“SRM personnel”) to post content on one or multiple social media channels through a single interface. By integrating these components into a single unified service, businesses may quickly react to and provide relevant content through various social media channels.
SRM personnel and social response teams are reluctant to offload tasks onto machines for fear of missing important information. Nevertheless, many SRM personnel and social response teams have incorporated an SRM system into their strategy to help organize, arrange, and highlight relevant social media content when they are otherwise unable to manually read all of the content. Once the social media content is arranged and highlighted in a graphical user interface (GUI), marketing or other SRM personnel may analyze the highlighted data to determine the best way to respond, if any. Using SRM systems in this manner has helped SRM personnel address the most critical content.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.